Perlmeister Mike Schilli celebrates 10 years

“I THINK IN PERL”

Author(s): ULRICH BANTLE

“One or two years in the USA would be great,” Mike Schilli thought back in 1996. The “Perlmeister” has lived in San Francisco for 11 years now, and he’s been writing the regular Perl column for almost as long.

When Mike Schilli, a.k.a. the Perlmeister [1], leaves his apartment and walks down the lively 24th Street in San Francisco’s Noe Valley, he regularly meets acquaintances and stops to visit. The green-card holder is still fascinated with the unique atmosphere in the City on the Bay. “San Francisco is close, like a village, but it still leaves you enough freedom for eccentricities,” he says. And this “village” is the perfect harbor for Mike in another sense: “Everybody’s a foreigner here. More or less nobody who lives here was actually born in San Francisco.” This has really helped Mike, who is from Augsburg, Germany, to get acclimatized.

Since the first Perl column back in 1996, Mike has worked for several companies.After his first job with a startup called Blaxxun Interactive, Mike moved to AOL before the dotcom bubble burst. Mike moved to Yahoo! when America Online became entangled in the browser wars after acquiring Netscape and reduced staff levels in Mountain View, California, from 2000 to 200. Mike turned his Perl hobby into his profession.